Beall’s takes stance against Border Tax Adjustment

For more than 100 years, Beall’s has thrived by serving our customers in an ever-changing and hyper-competitive retail environment. To be sure, we’ve benefited from the economic vitality of Florida and the United States, but we’ve also successfully managed through periods of recession and anemic growth. It’s probably no surprise that we oppose the so-called Border Adjustment Tax component of the tax reform package that is being considered by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Even if the reform measure results in a significant reduction in tax rates, the BAT would trigger a dramatic cost increase for retailers like Beall’s – one that would be so large that no business could simply absorb it.

Given this, there is little doubt in my mind that, should the BAT become law, prices would go up materially for consumers and, in some cases, stores would be shuttered and jobs would be lost.

That’s very troubling when you consider that the impact that retailing has on our state’s economy. We employ more than 2.6 million Floridians. Nationwide, consumer spending accounts for approximately 60 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and our industry provides approximately one in four jobs. That’s 42 million employed Americans that are helping drive the economy.

When compared to most any other industry, retail companies benefit from very few significant tax breaks, and most pay very high effective tax rates. So it seems terribly unfair to impose a punitive tax like the BAT on us.

If the objective of a tax reform is to revitalize the U.S. economy, the BAT would likely have the opposite effect. Worse yet is that the Americans that will bear the biggest brunt of the BAT would be the lower- and middle-income consumers who shop in stores like ours — or work in them.

This story was originally published June 3, 2017 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Beall’s takes stance against Border Tax Adjustment."